Power Creep

I was reading about the level cap increasing from 60 to 70 in an online game, with many new possibilities/abilities. "How do people keep track of so many abilities at such high levels?" I thought. Then I realized yet another reason why I prefer simple games: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Another version, about Japanese gardening, is "Your garden is not complete until there is nothing else that you can remove."

View attachment 88890​

Games are sets of artificial (separated from the real world) constraints, even games as "loosey-goosey" in rules as RPGs. Players agree to use and abide by these constraints. The best players are usually those who cope best with those constraints.

"Power Creep virtually always leads to a Broken Base, with the most ‘conservative’ players stating that the new unbalanced content is an insult to the original game (which might be true or not, depending on the case)." --TV Tropes

Good play comes not from having lots of things you can do, many of them really “OP” (overpowered), but from making good use of what you've got. Another case of creativity benefitting from constraints.

Power creep is a common online (video) game problem that we can see in tabletop RPGs. The cause isn't online play, it's the frequent changes and additions to rules and to "content". New "stuff" is more attractive when it's better than the old stuff (duh!), so that's what the makers produce, and over time the entire game sees an increase in power, in what the players can do. (See “The Dilemma of the Simple RPG.”) This must be matched by an increase in the power of the opposition (more dangerous monsters) or the game becomes too easy. Some games handle the escalation better than others, but if the game was well-designed to begin with, power creep is likely to hurt the design.

Make no mistake, I like blowing things up with tac nukes - well, fireballs anyway - and megawatt lasers (lightning bolts). But when you get up into Timestops and other Immense Godlike Powers, I think the GAME suffers in favor of the POWER TRIP. And at the same time it becomes less skillful, less clever, and harder to GM.

I’ve often said, about 1e D&D, that the “sweet spot” for play was 3rd-9^th level. Early on players were too fragile (not a problem in recent editions), and later on the game couldn’t cope well with double-figure levels. It got to the point that (as in WW II armored battles) whoever fired first usually won, because the attack capabilities were so strong. This is especially obvious where surprise is involved. If a game then “power creeps” to where 9^th levels are as strong as 11^th used to be, the situation worsens.

Of course, many players and GMs don't care about skill or cleverness, they care about other things (among them, power trips). What I’ve said is descriptive, not prescriptive. I don't care how you run or play your game (unless I'm involved!).

contributed by Lewis Pulsipher

 

[Celebrim]

Well, I'm not a WoW player, but iirc, you're wrong about WoW having 'false leveling'. The game's divided into 'zones' meant for different level ranges. But there's nothing preventing you from visiting zones that aren't appropriate for your level. If your character is level 50 and you enter a zone intended for level 10, all monsters will appear 'grey' to you, indicating you won't get any xp for killing them.

I played WoW for about a year and had a level 90 character at one point and got the banner that you got for completing every quest in the game.

Your objection answers itself. Yes, you can go to zones you are not intended to go to. You can earn the right to enter zones that were previously too difficult for you to enter, and you can go back to zones that were once challenging and have a cake walk - for instance soloing an instance that before you found impossible. But the point is that the game actively punishes you for approaching the game this way, and as a practical matter long term players just don't play that way. Content is only meaningful if it is at your level. And the experience of play of things that are at your level is always very much the same after you open up your full hot bar quite early on.

Unless someone is consciously trying to mimic the idea of zones, this is very different than a typical D&D sandbox. The area the PC's in my current campaign started in had threats from encounter levels below 1 to encounter levels above 20. There are places a short journey from where they started they still couldn't go. They've moved on to other areas and they are still finding things above and below their level. More importantly, they've obviously grown in scope of power from being nobodies that no one paid attention to, to being highly influential figures that dominate pretty much any social setting they enter into. In WoW, if you play as expected you are the center of attention the whole time, and yet wherever you go everything is perfectly tuned to offer a particular experience that is exactly like the experience you had one or five levels ago and no where you go actually responds to your wishes. If you play the game as intended, and then step back from your experience of the game and try to imagine how the PC would perceive his experience of the world (assuming that the PC can't literally see numbers and health bars), I think you'll see that from the PC's perspective he's not leveling up. He keeps encountering things of the same sort and having the same degree of difficult with him. With instance scaling, that's even more the case - every BBEG is about the same 'level'.

This is very typical of Blizzard games. For example, once you hit about level 20 in Diablo 2, you'll have functionally unlocked all your basic skills and filled your bar with combat options. From that point on, the game plays basically exactly the same again and again and again. Everything scales with you. You never actually 'level up', the numbers just get bigger.

Consider also that even to the extent that I have zones, that zone isn't going to be filled (in most campaigns) with 10th level goblin fighters and double HD cave bears. Dangerous zones are going to be occupied by monsters of greater power. D&D has always encouraged monsters to be of a predictable difficulty. The lower level of the dungeon either has more zombies, or it has ghasts, or it has hill giant zomies. It doesn't just have ordinary zombies scaled up to threaten you. My BBEG and his minions have been the same level since the party was 1st level.

Skyrim isn't as bad as earlier Elder Scrolls games. They instituted minimums and maximums that do mean that to a certain extent you are leveling up and things that once were problems - saber-tooth cats, for example - will eventually no longer be problems. If anything, I found Skyrim suffered badly for inappropriate scaling, in that the game never got more challenging than it started out and the only way to produce challenge was gradually increase the games difficulty as you leveled up. If you didn't do this, all the main events were very anti-climatic. Worse, if you did the main quests first, you got the experience of the world shaking problems being caused by foes of no great power, while as you put it - the stuff in some random farmer's root cellar where lords of their kind.

It's also got terrible balance generally.

 

[billd91]

That doesn't sound right. The stats on a goblin, ogre, or dragon aren't supposed to change as the PCs get stronger. If an ogre presents a tough challenge when you're level three, it doesn't stay a tough challenge when you're level five; it gets way easier, because your numbers go up while their numbers stay the same.

Or what, do you just stop fighting level 4 green ogres and start fighting level 6 red ogres?

In tabletop games, I see it more as an encounter building problem. If everything is keeping up with the PC's developments, the person building the encounter may be trying to "extend the sweet spot", but it's really just a treadmill. There really should be things that don't level with the PCs in a campaign so that the players get a real sense of improvement. Paizo have had some chapters in their APs that involve fights with obviously inferior enemies to give the players a chance to revel in crushing encounters that would have been more challenging a few levels earlier.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

It is useful to consider the fact that preferences in games like RPGs is rooted in psychology (of course). Mostly I'm focusing on D&D here, just to put some fences around things.

Players of RPGs like future advancement, much like people in the real world do. People vastly prefer salary increases to the opposite: Think about whether you would prefer to have $50K, then $60K, then $70K in years 1, 2, and 3 of a job versus the opposite. From a purely rational standpoint you should prefer the opposite because it's got immediate payout. I'm sure there will be folks that argue this point because it seems counterintuitive, but consider: You might not survive to collect the $70K in year 3. Furthermore, inflation will have reduced its value to some degree. Therefore, you should go for the immediate payout. However, people tend to prefer the first one. There are various arguments about why, but one reflects on the value of "savoring" future advancements as a psychic good. So power growth in characters feels natural: You think about the goodies you can't yet do but will be able to and work towards it. A lot of the enjoyment of the game comes from thinking about what you can't yet do but hope to do someday.

Managing challenge levels and expectations require balancing the probability of victory to make it "just right". A combat with a bunch of goblins at low level is tough. A few levels later and they're chumps. Eventually they're not worth the RL time to fight so they stop appearing in the game. Again, real life tends to work this way. Young animals that play fight with each other give up when they consistently lose and the victors stop bothering, seeking better challenges. A game that's too easy prompts boredom, while a game that's too hard prompts learned helplessness.

Unfortunately, these two aspects are not completely simpatico, particularly with a simulationist type world design. In a simulationist world, the PCs should actually meet chumpier monsters like goblins with fair frequency. However, the players and DM will get bored with that. This is true even in CPRGs, where too many chump encounters is boring and frustrating to the players and DM alike. Game time is, after all, limited. Furthermore, really huge hordes of monsters are frustrating to run using the base rules, meaning that the "quantity" method of threat increasing becomes challenging to run.

There are various ways to handle these design dilemmas, but because they are dilemmas, there won't be a totally satisfactory solution.

What has been called "Gygaxian naturalism" posited that characters would start with smaller threats (kobolds, goblins) and continually graduate to bigger ones (over time, orcs and hobgoblins, bugbears, ogres, etc., up to giants and dragons). Similarly they'd have better capabilities and items become available. Some characters, particularly spellcasters, changed qualitatively over the course of an adventuring career. Most notable was the wizard, who started as a feeb with a few rare tricks but had some pretty notable bumps in power at level 5 with the advent of fireball, and going up with "wall" spells (level 7), teleportation (level 9), and so on. Over time, the wizard became one of the mightiest characters in the game, though still vulnerable if mobbed or caught after a long battle. Threats similarly scaled: Often this involved going further "down" in the dungeon or from relatively tamer environments closer to civilization to more dangerous ones further away. Of course you could subvert this with "killer kobolds" or having the chump monsters flee occasionally. Higher level characters also tended to switch into other tasks, such as founding a stronghold, reflecting a certain life cycle of a character.

3E was pretty hardcore simulationist, and had a huge power scale advancement over the course of a campaign.

A game like 4E, which is explicitly and very stridently gamist and strongly rooted in video games and minis games, tiered threats and put a number of them at different levels. So you'd have orcs that were leveled up. You didn't really graduate from threats, they advanced with you just as much. There still was some qualitative shifts in advancement but characters' powers didn't shift so much the way they did from lower to higher levels either.

5E seems to be kind of halfway between 4E and older versions of the game.

Power creep is a separate concept from advancement. If often happens because original content becomes obsolete when newer content gets released. In some cases this isn't bad: The original content might have been underpowered and should have been replaced. In other cases, it happens because designers just aren't as careful with later content. Finally, it is likely to be inevitable when one considers that more options provide more opportunities for synergies, some of which won't have been anticipated by the designers but will be found by people really focused on optimization.

I very much agree with another poster who notes that the action economy is the key to preventing real power creep issues. Things that happened in prior editions were things like off-turn actions, free action, or the ability to chain attacks together. The bonus action and the reaction (much as Mike Mearls, who IMO seems to have a decidedly poor feel for rules design, dislikes them) are actually pretty good things because they cut down on how much a player can milk those off-turn actions. (Off-turn actions also slow the game down a lot, which is really annoying for people who are sitting and waiting.) The action economy always was the way. In 3E you could allow Unearthed Arcana "gestalt characters" in a campaign. I did. On paper they look terribly OP, but in reality they really weren't because they could still only do so much in a round. Furthermore, they tended to have some MAD issues, which helped too.

 

[Ratskinner]

I'm not sure that Magic is a good example though. While, sure, there are exceptions, they've managed to keep things pretty decently balanced have they not? It's not like older cards or decks have been entirely phased out because the new cards are so much better. You still see lots of decks containing cards from earlier releases.

How much of that is due to previous episodes of power creep? I recall much discussion about toning things down after Urza's. Then things seemed to wobble for a few years. I haven't played in a while, but my son says my old killer Kamigawa and Invasion era decks can only stand up to modern casual decks, not tuned ones.

Sent from my LG-TP450 using EN World mobile app

 

[Ratskinner]

Was right with you up until that last paragraph:

Right, but without that last paragraph how could he fit in a useless dig at all these kids playing on his yard?


Sent from my LG-TP450 using EN World mobile app

 

[Ilbranteloth]

I've said for years--well, at least to my gaming group--that level increases are an illusion. My AC increases, Monster BAB increases. My BAB increases, Monster AC increases. My skill levels increase, DCs increase. It's all a wash. I've also wondered for years what a game would be like in which you entered a game world as a more or less static character, but the game world contained low "level" and high "level" Monsters. Say, maybe you'd enter the world at the equivalent of 5th level D&D, so there would be orcs and goblins, but also liches and ancient dragons.

Then the action would shift. Need to kill that high "level" ancient dragon that's awakened? Search for some lore, and/or search the sky-high Towers of the Dragon Riders for the weapon you need. I think it would be interesting to see how such a shift might encourage planning and strategy and adventuring to survive in such a world. Progress would be measured in something other than Levels. It might be measured in an Arrow of Dragon Slaying, or the Blessed Sword of Sir Gawain the Dragon Slayer.

I guess what might be missing would be a sense of achievement on the players' part? Maybe instead of "stronger" powers they would gain more powers/skills, could do more things, learn more "3rd level" spells, etc. Or you could invent a rewards system based on some in-world mechanic called Reputation or something.

Anyone ever tinker with or play a game like that?

Yes, but not in the way you describe.

First off, in AD&D and now 5e, the system does stay fairly static, and when you level up it does increase your effectiveness. Monsters don't increase in difficulty themselves, although you tend to challenge more difficult monsters. In contrast 4e was designed so everything scaled. Your AC, attack bonuses, etc. were all higher at 10th level than 1st, and the monsters scaled with you.

So my campaigns have (always had) very, very slow advancement. Levels 1-3 are fairly quick, you're learning your craft, and I like that many of the classes don't gain their archetype until 3rd level. After that, level advancement slows to a crawl in my campaign. Two years of play might get to 5th or maybe 7th level, and after that it levels off even more.

One of the reasons is exactly what you describe. It presents a world where a skilled team of adventurers succeeds not because of increasing power, but because of good use of the power they have, and finding solutions. Research, alliances (including with enemies), finding legendary items, etc. are all a big part of the play.

The sense of achievement is constant, and I'd argue, lasts much longer than most campaigns. Why? Because the goals are different. Instead of one of the major goals being advancement, and the acquisition of new powers, the goals are firmly rooted in the setting and the adventures themselves. Success is measured by...success.

WotC has talked about trying to expand the sweet spot, but I think the best way to expand it is to not leave it. If the adventures, the goals, the stories, and such are compelling, then achievement is through the success of the adventures (and they are never 100% successful).

I have had players that have played the same character for 6 or more years. With the ever increasing speed of level advancement in the rules, most characters level-out of the game now in as few as several months.

A mechanical or rules-based reward system really isn't needed. Although I tend to have more magic items in my campaign, most of them are consumables of some sort or another. Wands still have a finite number of charges. Which means that they also don't typically always have the same options all the time. For several adventures, they had a wand of fireballs which obviously affected their tactics. As the few charges were used up, they started saving it for "the right time" and switched to different tactics and abilities. So their "abilities" are always changing, based on what they have available to them, among other things. With most of them being temporary, it has a built in mechanic to encourage further adventure to gain new "abilities" without having to worry about their power level as much since they aren't permanent.

It also means the abilities are not given as much importance by the players. They don't define their characters, they are just tools. Instead, the characters are defined more by their personality and actions, their relationship to the world around them. Yes, there is nothing stopping any campaign from doing this. But when you remove the level-ups, many of the "cool" special abilities, then the focus shifts away from those cool special abilities.

To look at it a different way, when character gain special abilities, players want to use them. They often get annoyed when they don't come into play as often as they'd like, or if circumstances reduces the effectiveness, or removes their ability to use them altogether. But when the special abilities come from a magic item, and is known to be of a limited number of uses, they look for opportunities to make the most of that ability, and it's very cool when they get the chance to use it. Then it's done.

Anyway, I highly, highly recommend considering slow (or even no) level advancement. We also have level limits based on ability scores, they are more restrictive than AD&D, and ASIs only give you a +1 to an ability, so in many cases you're limited to a maximum level. And yet parties of 5th - 7th level characters still do take on dragons and such. A further step is to carefully consider what abilities to keep, modify, or remove/replace altogether.

I still buy every D&D book for ideas and such, but rarely use any of the new races, classes, etc. For a game company, publishing new stuff obviously makes a lot of sense. That's their business. But it doesn't mean we need to get caught up in all of the new stuff ourselves. Just because Power Creep might exist in the publications themselves doesn't mean it has to affect my campaign.

 

[Blue]

Sounds like Subtractive Design. There's definitely a significant value to saying "does this rule bring more value then the weight of it". But it does not mean complexity is bad - it means that needless complexity is bad. I could cut down all conflict resolution in an RPG to an unbiased coin flip - and some people would have a great time RPing and adventuring, and some DMs good at failing forward so the results of both sides of the coin were different, meaningful, and fun. But for all that, you'll probably engage more people if you increase the complexity.

On the other hand, a game with 70 levels may mean it just has more granularity. How many things advance your standard D&D level? Well, you usually get a feature. Sometimes more than one, let's call it 1.5. Oh, and HD. Oh, and every few levels your proficiency goes up, so that's light 1/4 of a bonus a level. But proficiency helps to hit (1) , and trained saves (2) , and caster DCs (.5 - only half the classes), and skills (4-5) - if we broke all of those out it would be like 8 every couple of levels. Taken all together, maybe it's 12 things every 4 levels (or an average of 3 things per level) - and if you wanted more granularity you could expand 5e to 60 levels. At this level one skill goes up +1. At this level you gain a HD. At this level you get a class feature. At this level one of your two trained skills gets +1. It would be the same amount of bonuses but more levels. Now, would that be more complex or actually easier since there is so little to worry about changing at any given advance? If you're getting a skill point in a tree and each step can take up to 5 points, what it really means is they wanted a lot of gradations because, you know, people like to be rewarded for playing RPG games by advancing in level. So they make it happen more often, but actually give you only a little each advance.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

First off, in AD&D and now 5e, the system does stay fairly static, and when you level up it does increase your effectiveness. Monsters don't increase in difficulty themselves, although you tend to challenge more difficult monsters. In contrast 4e was designed so everything scaled. Your AC, attack bonuses, etc. were all higher at 10th level than 1st, and the monsters scaled with you.

Absolutely agree.

So my campaigns have (always had) very, very slow advancement. Levels 1-3 are fairly quick, you're learning your craft, and I like that many of the classes don't gain their archetype until 3rd level. After that, level advancement slows to a crawl in my campaign. Two years of play might get to 5th or maybe 7th level, and after that it levels off even more. <snip>

Anyway, I highly, highly recommend considering slow (or even no) level advancement. We also have level limits based on ability scores, they are more restrictive than AD&D, and ASIs only give you a +1 to an ability, so in many cases you're limited to a maximum level. And yet parties of 5th - 7th level characters still do take on dragons and such. A further step is to carefully consider what abilities to keep, modify, or remove/replace altogether.

It really depends highly on the gaming group. Slow advancement really fits some groups very, very well.

For example, I am still running a heavily house ruled 2E game that was started in 1999. The main PCs started as level 4 and are now about level 10. We haven't run go go guns the whole time, but it's seen a lot of play. However, I've given them lots of opportunities for growth separate from pure level advancement. For instance, one character has as his background being a trader. So he has founded a business, lost one, and founded another. This doesn't really make him more personally powerful but gives the player a sense of satisfaction and character development.

I've also been in a Greyhawk game (with mostly the same players as the campaign I just mentioned) that adopted an "ensemble cast" model, where there is an interlocking group of characters that mix-and-match depending on the adventure. A variant on this approach is to have interesting henchmen in the party that the players can control. In fact, this is how the "ensemble cast" approach got started. We had some players leave and rather than find new players (it just didn't work out for whatever reason) we continued with the smaller group and just had the ensemble cast develop. In that game we had characters at the high and mid levels (2E that is, so between about levels 5 and 12). It's like the idea in Ars Magica, actually, where players might play a magus or grogs as the game needed in the adventure.

One big advantage of the ensemble cast approach is that you get a chance to play different characters with different abilities and personalities. In that game I played a fighter/mage, a paladin, a cleric, a fighter, another fighter, and a ranger, all of which got a chance to feel quite different and who didn't all get along. The other main player played a mage, a cleric/mage, a fighter/thief, and a few other characters I can't recall. For instance, our mage or mage multiclass characters were involved in various degrees with the Greyhawk Mage Guild and there were sessions that involved Guild politics things or times when those characters were busy doing things like learning spells or taking mastery tests and couldn't do something else, providing a reason for one of the other PCs to show up. Another decided to retire for in game reasons (after seeing one of his friends in the party one shot killed by a demon). His wedding ended up being an event at which other characters got introduced. These characters didn't really advance all that much but we were able to have high level and more mid level adventures in various configurations. I think the "ensemble cast" mode is actually how the old Lake Geneva guys did things.

With other groups, especially larger ones, this kind of format really doesn't work though, and people expect more level advancement in the whole "zero to hero" mode, having no other real idea of how to run things.

White Wolf offered some really interesting "no" or "limited advancement" options in the last book that got released to stores, Mirrors. It's hard to summarize all of the things in there but if you have access to it, check them out.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

Absolutely agree.




It really depends highly on the gaming group. Slow advancement really fits some groups very, very well.

For example, I am still running a heavily house ruled 2E game that was started in 1999. The main PCs started as level 4 and are now about level 10. We haven't run go go guns the whole time, but it's seen a lot of play. However, I've given them lots of opportunities for growth separate from pure level advancement. For instance, one character has as his background being a trader. So he has founded a business, lost one, and founded another. This doesn't really make him more personally powerful but gives the player a sense of satisfaction and character development.

I've also been in a Greyhawk game (with mostly the same players as the campaign I just mentioned) that adopted an "ensemble cast" model, where there is an interlocking group of characters that mix-and-match depending on the adventure. A variant on this approach is to have interesting henchmen in the party that the players can control. In fact, this is how the "ensemble cast" approach got started. We had some players leave and rather than find new players (it just didn't work out for whatever reason) we continued with the smaller group and just had the ensemble cast develop. In that game we had characters at the high and mid levels (2E that is, so between about levels 5 and 12). It's like the idea in Ars Magica, actually, where players might play a magus or grogs as the game needed in the adventure. One big advantage of the ensemble cast approach is that you get a chance to play different characters with different abilities and personalities. In that game I played a fighter/mage, a paladin, a cleric, a fighter, and a ranger, all of which got a chance to feel quite different. The other main player played a mage, a cleric/mage, a fighter/thief, and a few other characters I can't recall. Our mage characters were involved in various degrees with the Greyhawk Mage Guild. These characters didn't really advance all that much but we were able to have high level and more mid level adventures in various configurations. I think the "ensemble cast" mode is actually how the old Lake Geneva guys did things.

With other groups, especially larger ones, this kind of format really doesn't work though, and people expect more level advancement in the whole "zero to hero" mode, having no other real idea of how to run things.

Great stuff.

Yes, I have an ensemble mode campaign and it’s based off of how I think the Geneva guys played. Everybody has multiple characters and we can jump to a different group of characters depending on who can make it to the game that week. I’m even planning on expanding this to a public campaign and players from the home campaign can jump on with their characters too.

I’ve started moving in this direction in part to safeguard against the inevitable attrition. When an interesting arc is happening, a particular group might make a 3-6 week commitment, but then when somebody can’t make it we continue the campaign with a different group.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

Absolutely agree.




It really depends highly on the gaming group. Slow advancement really fits some groups very, very well.

For example, I am still running a heavily house ruled 2E game that was started in 1999. The main PCs started as level 4 and are now about level 10. We haven't run go go guns the whole time, but it's seen a lot of play. However, I've given them lots of opportunities for growth separate from pure level advancement. For instance, one character has as his background being a trader. So he has founded a business, lost one, and founded another. This doesn't really make him more personally powerful but gives the player a sense of satisfaction and character development.

I've also been in a Greyhawk game (with mostly the same players as the campaign I just mentioned) that adopted an "ensemble cast" model, where there is an interlocking group of characters that mix-and-match depending on the adventure. A variant on this approach is to have interesting henchmen in the party that the players can control. In fact, this is how the "ensemble cast" approach got started. We had some players leave and rather than find new players (it just didn't work out for whatever reason) we continued with the smaller group and just had the ensemble cast develop. In that game we had characters at the high and mid levels (2E that is, so between about levels 5 and 12). It's like the idea in Ars Magica, actually, where players might play a magus or grogs as the game needed in the adventure. One big advantage of the ensemble cast approach is that you get a chance to play different characters with different abilities and personalities. In that game I played a fighter/mage, a paladin, a cleric, a fighter, and a ranger, all of which got a chance to feel quite different. The other main player played a mage, a cleric/mage, a fighter/thief, and a few other characters I can't recall. Our mage characters were involved in various degrees with the Greyhawk Mage Guild. These characters didn't really advance all that much but we were able to have high level and more mid level adventures in various configurations. I think the "ensemble cast" mode is actually how the old Lake Geneva guys did things.

With other groups, especially larger ones, this kind of format really doesn't work though, and people expect more level advancement in the whole "zero to hero" mode, having no other real idea of how to run things.

Great stuff.

Yes, I have an ensemble mode campaign and it’s based off of how I think the Geneva guys played. Everybody has multiple characters and we can jump to a different group of characters depending on who can make it to the game that week. I’m even planning on expanding this to a public campaign and players from the home campaign can jump on with their characters too.

I’ve started moving in this direction in part to safeguard against the inevitable attrition. When an interesting arc is happening, a particular group might make a 3-6 week commitment, but then when somebody can’t make it we continue the campaign with a different group.